The 3.5-inch desktop drive, the industry’s first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface, meets the capacity demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications while delivering the highest performance in its class.

The introduction of the Barracuda XT drive marks the shift to the next generation of desktop computing speed as Seagate doubles the storage bandwidth of current computers.

“Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office,” said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date.”

The Barracuda XT product, a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch, delivers the highest performance – burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second – for all PC applications, maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. The hard drive’s SATA 6Gb/s interface enables system builders using SATA 6Gb/s drive controllers to build high-performance desktop PCs, full-tilt gaming rigs, and home and small business servers, and its 64MB cache optimizes burst performance and data transfer speeds.

“Marvell is pleased to be announcing the industry’s first commercially available SATA 6Gb/s solution and working with Seagate to introduce this technology,” said Dr. Alan J. Armstrong, vice president of Marketing, Business Storage Group at Marvell. “Marvell has been working with a broad group of partners and customers to bring this solution to market. As early adopters of Marvell’s SATA 6Gb/s technology, both ASUS and GIGABYTE offer motherboards to complement SATA 6Gb/s hard drives.”

With Barracuda XT drives and SATA 6Gb/s motherboards from ASUS and Gigabyte, computer makers can build the highest-performance PCs, workstations and entry-level servers. ASUS was first to market with a SATA 6Gb/s motherboard; the company’s P7P55D Premium began shipping in August. The new GIGABYTE P55 series GA-P55-Extreme motherboards are also now shipping .

“At ASUS, we are once again at the forefront of innovation by being the first to launch a native SATA 6Gb/s interface on a motherboard,” said Joe Hsieh, corporate vice president & general manager, Motherboard Business Unit & Desktop Business Unit, ASUS. “An expansion bridge integrated into the P7P55D Premium helps achieve real SATA 6Gb/s throughput to support bandwidth-hungry applications. The ASUS solution eliminates transmission bottlenecks in current technology and ensures users truly enjoy faster data speeds and double the storage bandwidth. For other P7P55D Series models, ASUS also provides an expansion card to achieve the same results.”

“GIGABYTE has worked closely with our partners Seagate and Marvell in making the highly anticipated SATA 6Gb/s technology a reality,” said Tony Liao, associate vice president of Marketing at GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD. “As the leader in motherboard innovation, GIGABYTE is always excited to bring the very latest technologies to market, and with the release of the world’s first SATA 6Gb/s hard drive from Seagate, our customers’ expectations will be blown away with double-the-bandwidth performance for lightning-fast data transfer and storage.”